Down here, I hear his voice.
Writhing among the faces and the broken maelstrom of tortured lives, screaming for my own resurrection in the flood rush of complete insanity, I hear his voice.
The voice of my father.
Coming closer.
I feel the breath of the others, hot on the back of my neck as I move toward the memory, but it’s not any one person’s memory—it’s the memory of many.
The memory of all of them, cut apart and pasted back together.
A multi-camera passion play, flashing at the end of a long dark tunnel to nowhere.
The play of the Blackjack Nine.
Rushing toward me.
I run toward it.
My father’s voice breaks the surface.
“I am the only god you will ever need.”
He stands in the sun, his face baked in the heat that pours down from a bright blue sky, and his face is my face, and I smile because it really is true—I’m one hell of a handsome bastard. My smile sparkles, all white teeth and square jaw, sleepy eyes that seem to withhold the secrets of the universe. It all comes in sharp focus, and I see him from seven different angles—seven minds, taking him in all at once.
Seven, not eight.
There are eight followers, but I only see through the eyes of seven.
I didn’t get all of them.
But in this dream…I still see all eight of his followers. Eight tortured minds who went free when they died in the Triangle and waited for years to find new bodies. Eight unbound spirits who found willing donors. The donors are drifters. Hippies. Failed seekers. The mid-seventies is full of them, and so is the Triangle.
They each kneel in a row.
And before each of them is a silver urn.
All in the name of handsome Jack, who stands on a grassy dune before them, his fist in the air. His voice again, my voice:
“You are all born again to the purest faith. I have given you the gift. If you turn away now, you turn away from immortality. If you believe in me, I will set you free. You have walked and cried and kneeled in the name of things that this world will punish you for. But flesh is only a means to an end. I am the only god you will ever need.”
He’s tricked these burnouts, every one of them—with his voice and his smile and the magic that burns within his body. Tricked them all into becoming possessed by the worst serial killers on earth. The spirits rumble inside their bellies—sour muck, like the muck inside me now. They want out and Jack will set them free. This is his promise to them. His plan. I sense it so clearly now—all their minds tuned to the same mission. Jack leads them, he is their master.
My father…
His fist opens and the razors glitter, rivulets of blood racing down his arm.
One razor for each of them.
Jack tells them the blood is good, that the blood will bring them life eternal—actually uses those cheesy words, like something out of an old Dracula movie.
But cheese works if you mean it.
If your voice is magical.
Jack is magic.
The blood is the life.
They take the razors from his hand. They do not hesitate. This is all part of the plan. They searched for years to find each other. This is the moment that changes everything. His voice makes them do it. The sound of his voice.
His power.
I see and feel and hear it all go down in adrenaline shocks that pound me on the outer edge. Bursts of red and blasts of venom. The razors in their hands, raised to their lips, swallowed whole like bitter pills. Ripping their insides apart. The marks inside the flesh tearing free in terrible spasms, coming up in rivers of bloody bile, splashing into the silver urns at their knees like wine, steaming and blackened. Reeking in the sun. Each soul swimming in its own filth, cut loose and screaming in the muck. I am each one of them, leaving those pathetic bodies that were so necessary just moments before, swirling down inside the urns, bouncing back against the silver walls, ready to give themselves again…
…and thirty years later, they are trapped in my guts…
…they are trapped within me now…
…making me have this terrible dream…
…just the way they were trapped then, by the power of his voice. The power that made them give up on flesh forever, so that they could be immortal.
That was the plan.
Jack’s plan.
The host bodies lie in a row, abandoned, slashed to hell from the inside out. Their souls swirl in silver, ready to make the final leap.
Into Jack.
This is the moment that changes everything.
And I see my mother now, in that moment.
She walks over the dune, just behind him. She is beautiful in a pleated summer dress that ripples her body in the desert air. Her hair is long and blonde and tangled up in dreads-by-default. Her eyes are so blue they blow me away. Her mind is full of desperation and loss and disappointment—the kind you feel when you know everything you ever loved lies in ruins, and all that remains is the task. That thing you must do.
The Terrible Thing.
My mother’s eyes tell all these tales and so many more, flowing across the dream in a crystal clear shot of pure insight—they all feel it hard.
Jack feels it, too.
As she walks over the dune rise, springing her trap.
The gun in her hands.
She has searched for so long to find my father. Her heart is full of burned-out love and screwed-up things that tortured her for years. The face of her one true love, needling her in nightmares, making her go on, knowing he was just out of her reach. She failed so many times, but then she knew…and she came here to this place to finish it.
But she doesn’t come alone.
She hasn’t been alone for a while now.
Someone helped her to find my father.
Someone saved her life, just like he saved mine—found her in this terrible desert that steals souls. He armored her. Took her to that place in the Blacklight where only spirits tell. Allowed her to come to this very moment, where it all goes down, finally.
The old Indian man standing at her side.
The old man…
Jack raises the first urn to his lips, the empty host bodies of his eight followers limp and abandoned in a row before him, drained of the bile, all for him, all because it’s part of the plan. My mother’s hands grip the gun, aiming right at the monster that has my face.
My father.
He sees her and stops, his eyes wide, his smile jagged like lightning.
“I get it now.”
His voice is displaced and strange—something out of harmony with the sneer on his face.
“Very clever, bitch. But you won’t pull that trigger. I know you won’t.”
She knows it too.
If she pulls the trigger, she loses everything.
Everything.
“i dare you to pull that trigger!”
But the child is safe.
And she has no choice.
She looks right in my father’s eyes and says:
“I love you, Buck.”
And the gun explodes in a firebloom, sending me into a tailspin. And I struggle to make it up from the memory because it’s too much now, the dream hot and slashing, like a mirror shattering in a superheated explosion…but I want to see…i want to see…
And the bullet smashes into my father’s heart.
He comes at her and she fires again and again.
His razorblade cuts her throat as her last shot takes him.
And he slumps over…crying…his terrible voice blasting into oblivion to join a million others in the Blacklight…
My mother bleeds.
The old Indian man holds her and she says to finish the task.
Bury them.
Bury them in the urns and never let them come back.
And she puts the gun in the old man’s hand.
Tells him to leave it for her son.
Her voice croaks and fades away to nothing…and the dream fades away with her…the face of the old man…a face I will not see again for thirty years…
I come awake in a dark room.
My body aches. Broken bones, slashes and bruises. My left hand is set in a cast and bandaged.
The marks still grumble down low.
But they can’t possess me now.
I’ve digested them.
I was tripping in their minds again—their collective mind, this time. The answers all there, but horrible and sour in my mouth. Rusty metal and blood. The pulsing heat lingering from the desert in my head, reminding me of so many years I spent on the road, looming like a shadow in the dust. Years and years, searching for an answer. Searching for them.
The old man, who saved me from it.
Who sacrificed his own son, so that I could live and come here.
Did he know all this would happen?
“You look like shit, Buck.”
I look up and there’s a dead man leaning against the bars of my cage.
We’re in a police station of some kind. Empty holding cell. They brought me here fast. Took my Walkman and my gun, too, while I was dead to the world.
Dead like Darby, who I can hardly see, backlit by the dull fluorescents running along the corridor ceiling just on the other side of the bars.
I get up on the cot, squint my eyes to bring his image into focus.
It doesn’t work all that good.
He’s turned into a see-through anatomy model, half-there in little bursts through skin made of wavering liquid, like some matter teleportation experiment gone wrong. I can tell he’s struggling to keep himself in this room, pulling at the air in desperate grabs with his fingers, which peel back and shred as he loses himself.
“Darby…what’s happened to you?”
“I can’t stay with you, Buck. Whatever happened on that train…it was major. You’ve got something real hot inside you now. Not just marks. Some kind of force. I can’t get much closer. It burns.”
His voice is crumbling, going all static on me.
“I’ll pull you back, Darby.”
“No, you can’t. I made it back to warn you…”
The marks inside me hear his disintegrating voice and hiss in my blood.
“…you have to get that shit out of you fast, Buck…it’s causing shockwaves all over hell and back on my side…do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“I can feel it. A combined power.”
“It’ll consume you and eat up everything…Blackjack Williams knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“Blackjack Williams…he was trying to tap into the Blacklight…trying to find a way to make himself immortal…but the power is bigger than all that…it’s making everyone run for their lives in the slipstream…that’s what they were all trying to warn us about.”
“Blackjack was my father.”
“I wouldn’t…be…so sure about that…”
“What do you…?”
And it comes clear.
He couldn’t have been my father.
Not exactly.
Jack was executed in prison—a notorious serial killer with years of cold-blooded murder to his name.
My mother didn’t kill Jack.
She killed my father.
Jack’s spirit had possessed his body.
“Stay with me, Darby. I need more answers. Why would Jack want to destroy the Blacklight?”
“Not destroy, Buck…it’s all about controlling the dead parts of the world…don’t you get it? Everything in the world is dead…”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Look around you, Buck…the only thing living in this room is you.”
My heart falls.
It has to be the truth.
All my life I’ve been surrounded by dead things, but I was distracted by the obvious—those moaning, screeching apparitions that whispered to me and hid in concrete corners, those phantoms and Walkers and ghosts that made me crazy and haunted. I was too blinded by the Blacklight to see one simple truth and that truth was this: Those concrete corners were dead, too.
The brick and mortar of every building I ever stood in.
The hard wood that made every door I ever walked through.
It was all alive once, part of an infinite cycle of birth and decay.
Everything made to serve man has to die before it means something.
And it all rots now under our feet.
Our own bodies are made of dead things—our hair, our fingernails, the cells of our skin shedding into the air to make dust particles.
The air itself—filled with poisons and gasses.
All of it dead.
All of it rotting.
I sense that rot, that final stage of the cycle…the terrible endless swan song of everything dead that surrounds me…as the Power courses inside my body.
And I realize that it’s the power to control all dead things.
That’s why Darby can’t come near me.
That’s why my mother killed my father.
He felt the Power and was seduced, just the way I was.
That desire has been in my blood since I was born.
The followers of Blackjack Williams were the pieces of a puzzle—and that puzzle was meant to create some sort of god on earth. They were stopped and buried. But how were they resurrected?
And why did his disciples hit us on the train—why now?
He hears me think that and his garbled voice electrifies the air again. “It was the train itself…something to do with the speed and the magnetic field…like a skeleton key…freeing them from their graves one by one…”
“And I came because the spirits told me to. Because you told me to.”
“It was the ride to end all rides, Buck.”
That’s why my mother sacrificed so much.
That was why the old Indian came to my rescue.
He found her too.
And knew saving us both was the only way to prevent what might have been the end of everything—the Power to rule all dead things controlled and held in the body of one man. And that one man is me, now that Jack is long gone.
Jack went free when my father died.
His spirit was never buried like the others.
He couldn’t have been one of the marks on the train.
It’s a sick irony that swims in the pit of my stomach, like the fucked-up souls swirling there, screaming my name, ready to take on the world at my command.
But the circuit is still not complete.
Not without…
“There’s one mark left,” I say. “It’s in the senator. I think it’s the one I lost when the restaurant blew up—the one that was in Rashid Hopi.”
“Good luck with that.”
“I have to get out of here. Can you help me?”
“I told you, I can’t stay with you…it’s hard just staying in this room…can you still hear me…”
“Yeah, I can hear you. Like a bad channel on the radio. Just like you said before. Maybe you’re finally going to see Elvis, man.”
“He better hope not…the fat…fuck…”
Gone now, sucked back into the light beyond this room, his voice a dim memory.
Gone.
I get up and call his name, scream at him to come back.
My voice echoes down the corridor beyond the bars of my cell, and the tinny noise of a TV around the bend floats back. The sound of commentators and crowd noise—the rally, going on as planned. Someone casually yells at me from the front of the station to shut the hell up, then he calls me an asshole and says to sit tight. Shadows move at the end of the hall. Sounds of walnut heels on a smooth, polished floor. Cops pacing around, waiting for backup to arrive. I’m fucked.
But I haven’t been here long.
If the rally is still happening, there’s just minutes before Maximum Bob hits the stage. I concentrate hard and hear the voices on the TV. They’re not talking about tragedy and death aboard the Laser. There was some kind of statement just made by Sidney Jaeger—something about how the show must go on. Technical problems. The speed test in the secret desert pass not going quite as planned. Not one word about the people who died, the fire on board. How are they keeping it quiet? Major people bought the farm—it was a bloodbath.
This is completely insane.
The commentators drone on and the moment of truth draws near. The senator’s speech on the big stage. Nobody has any idea what kind of a monster lives behind his eyes now, what he could do if he becomes president with that thing still in him.
I have to get out of here.
Have to try something.
Anything.
I try screaming again. I yell that I need to use the bathroom. A bored voice floats back, telling me tough shit, kid, and sit tight again. It’ll all be over soon, the guy says. I try to concentrate on his voice. Try to visualize what he looks like, what the room around the bend at the far end of the narrow corridor looks like, how many men they have. This place seems really small, really empty. Definitely a holding cell, somewhere in the Dreamworld. If this place is so big that it has its own zip code then it definitely has its own police division, the way most city hospitals do.
But…
The marks hit me again, real hard, in the stomach.
I stumble back as the Power rises to the surface and whites out my world, filling me with the anger and pain and undead ambition of seven bad motherfuckers. Snippets of crimes long buried in the desert come pouring in again, and it snakes through my veins, into my hands, crackling in my broken fingers under the cast. I ball my right fist and bear down hard, planting my feet, allowing the Power to ground me, controlling it.
I am the only god you will ever need.
Down.
It surges again, coming up like a spiraling tube wave. I engage it and ride the tube like a surfer from hell, sending my mind along the center of its gravity, getting a grip easy. I feel their voices and they tear at the walls. I feel the fragile strands of my soul going white—one hair at a time. This really hurts, but I’m keeping them down.
What happens when I can’t?
What happens when they become too hot to handle?
What happens when it seduces me again, the same way it seduced my father—turned him into a willing vessel for Blackjack Williams?
The Power to destroy everything dead lives in me.
I have to get it out.
* * *
For the next few minutes, I try making myself puke.
I stick my fingers down my throat first—that’s never worked on me before but I’m running pretty desperate right about now. It used to be real easy with a bellyful of bad gunk like this, but the gunk ain’t moving. Sticking to my insides like napalm, hanging on for dear life, yahooing in my blood, joyriding my biorhythms. Laughing at me as I try to will myself to force it up, calling me a fucking moron as all my efforts fail.
Gonna take more than this, and I can’t do it here.
It’ll be really dangerous anyway without some way to contain the mess.
I once chucked up a soul in a parking lot and it was dirty, ugly business. I’m reminded of that night in living color, the memory full of deep black slime snaking across the pavement like devil seed. I couldn’t keep that one in for long because she was a real fighter—the unbound soul of a teacher who loved her students the wrong way. She kicked and screamed, the same way these bad bastards inside me are kicking and screaming—but she wanted to come out of me. Wanted to get her hands around the nearest human throat and cause some major damage. Some marks have no idea when they’re beaten. They stay unsettled in the muck until the moment you bury them.
The way my parents used to bury them.
I am the only god you will ever need.
No.
Don’t think about it.
The moment—concentrate on the moment.
I sit on the floor, cross-legged.
I clear my head as best I can, the rumble boiling low. I take myself slowly to a place of calm. Guided meditation. I tell my body to keep this Power down. To bring it under control. I use the Pull.
It surges on me, filling my blood again, and I hold it down again.
An idea begins to form.
If the only thing living in this room is me…
If I can summon control over inanimate matter…
If what Darby said is really true…
I have to try.
I think about my mother, and her years of searching. My father, who allowed this same feeling that now lurks in my body to take him over and make him a killer. I have to honor them. I have to avenge them. I have to use this right. I feel like a junkie again—rationalizing, like I rationalized back in the desert. I got a kid killed that way. I could get everybody killed this way.
I have to try.
It surges one more time and I use the Pull to engage it now, feeling the flood shoot into me, taking it like an injection, seven souls combined into one soul, colliding with mine in a searing burst of lifelight. And I throw myself into them, the way I always do when I first pull a mark, pulling their madness close to me…pulling it in…
The heat washes over my body, weaker than ever before, but then I tighten my grip on the madness, giving myself to it…and the madness is good, the madness fuels my body in a dreamtime sizzle, bursting and flashing, energizing. The dark blue glow intensifies. The voices of a million billion angry bastards rip off in my ears, thundering in the infinite spaces set before me, the neon-striped outlines of the real world just outside the menagerie of slithering zero gravity shapes, like half-formed moray eels and faces filled with burning eyes and cursing tongues. The world changes and flickers, just like it always does. I see this same room, years before it was even built. I see the hundreds of people who have stood right here in this spot.
And it all comes clear, these things I see.
These things I’ve seen for years.
These are dead things.
And I see them here because this is the place where all dead things go.
They remain here forever, even after they are destroyed.
I’ve been able to reach out so many times and pull those things from this place—bring them back to the world through the lens of the Blacklight.
I’ve seen it hundreds and hundreds of times.
Everything that exists in the world—a map, a gun, a pair of shoes, an old camera—it all has to die before it becomes any of those things.
The world is made of dead things.
My father saw this, too.
I am my father’s son.
And the seven mad bastards trying to focus themselves through my eyes now—these doomed, fucked-up killers who were promised immortality by a handsome liar—they want to use my eyes.
I am the crucial missing circuit.
I am the lens to the Blacklight they want to control.
I feel it powering through my bad hand, coming to my command—the Power to rule everything dead.
And in the moment it explodes from me, I scream.
I come out of the Blacklight with the sound of my own voice hammering the air, the force of my will sizzling through my broken fingers, instructing the bones to mend themselves as they fuse with white ice and burning lava, crackling and popping and pulsing.
A raw burst of energy so intense my fingers can’t hold it for long.
It lights up my nerve centers.
It rattles my entire body.
The raw burst transforms into a thick shockwave which expands through my mended bones, seeps through the pores of my skin, blasts outward with a scream that shatters the cast on my wrist into dust…and I’m SCREAMING . . .
. . . SCREAMING…!
And the expanding shockwave becomes a wall of invisible fire, slamming the prison bars just ahead of me, materializing as a dark fist of neon, pulled from the burning essence of a million dead souls…and it sets the iron on fire.
The bars glow, and then crumble.
And then they are gone forever.
Gone because I banished them.
I pull the fist back into me and the Power thrashes like a drunk shitkicker, moshing me from left to right, manipulating my body in one wild stumble after another as I try to get a grip. It’s still manhandling me when the cops appear from around the corner ahead. I see them as black outlines in the hall.
One of them yells something intelligent: “Hey, you!”
The other one is going for the stick on his hip.
Something bolts through the muscles inside my arms, and the bolt explodes forward through the air to land an invisible clamp across the cop’s weapon. The polished wood was once alive, but now it’s dead—and I control it, the same way I controlled my own bones, which now sizzle and hum, shot through and fortified with white-hot energy. The nightstick spins in the air and bounces off the wall, clunking on the floor. My whole body is flying as his face goes white with shock, and the second cop can’t even see me—I am a whisper and a blur, and my first blow hits him hard in the chest. I hit him with my good left hand. His lungs give up the goods as his rib cage implodes, and a cracking noise fills the corridor.
The Power, surging downward now.
As my human mind and my battered body remembers it’s not a god or a ghost.
Remembers my training, all in my hands and feet.
I focus up, the cop on the left wheezing and halfway out of the game, watching his buddy take the full brunt of my attack as I spin with complete control, my foot in the sky, swiping across the guy’s face, rearranging his nose a little. He forgets how to stand up and decides to kiss the wall, out like a light in two seconds, slumping like a sack of shit to the floor, out cold. The one with the busted ribs goes down at the same time, begging me not to hurt him anymore. They don’t even have guns. Just wooden sticks and pepper spray.
I just took out a couple of security guards.
The Power, ebbing low now, but making all kinds of threats. It got a taste and it wants more—it senses everything around me, everything dead, and it wants to smash every bit of it. I could control it all or destroy it all.
I can’t let that happen.
Down, all of you.
I am the only god you will ever need.
I flex the fingers of my left hand.
The power still sizzles in the freshly knit bones.
I can feel it healing the rest of my body.
Finding the dying tissues and restoring them.
This is a taste of what Jack wanted.
To be a god on earth.
And it feels good.
No.
Down.
I can’t let it happen.
I get the stick off the guy who forgot how to stand and relieve him of his pepper spray, then put the business end of the weapon in his buddy’s face, ordering him to grab his legs and open the next holding cell over. There’s three along this little hallway, smaller than the one I was in.
He does it really fast for a man with busted ribs.
I keep the stick aimed at him the whole time like a gun. He unlocks the steel gate and pulls his partner in with him, slams it shut, wincing through half-assed curses that I’m never gonna get away with this. The FBI is on the way, I won’t get out of here alive. Blah, blah, blah. The words don’t even reach me in complete sentences. I’m thinking ahead, to what I have to do now. Bob Maxton. A hard target, if there ever was one.
I have no choice but to go after him.
The Power inside me likes this idea.
I feel it race with collective anticipation—jacked anxiety like a shot to the arm.
Down, you fuckers.
I tell the broken-rib guy to give me the keys and he hands them right over. I tell him to unbuckle his badass utility belt and he hands that over, too. Squeezes it through the bars with a jangle and a twist of leather. I see by the plate on his chest that his name is Ash Laurence, and I call him that when I tell him there’s no hard feelings about any of this and that he’ll be okay if he gets to a hospital eventually—there’s not much a doctor can do with busted ribs, but if there’s no internal bleeding, he should be just fine.
I tell him sorry again, rounding the corner into the main office, leaving his cries for reason behind.
The Power, letting me do this now, staying its hand, holding back.
Mexican standoff.
Today’s just been full of those fucking things.
The front office is a tiny room, with a few desks. A pitiful sliver-view of the lights of the Dreamworld twinkling in the distance through a couple of glass doors. We’re at the far end of the park, away from prying eyes. No cops out there. I wonder again what’s up with all the lame security—seems like I oughta be on the Ten Most Wanted List by now, America’s Most Armed and Dangerous, hogtied down in a hole somewhere, being drilled by hardass secret agents with their sleeves rolled up while they test out brass knuckles to make me confess my terrible crime and give up my conspirators.
But no.
They stuck me in a holding tank and waited for the cavalry.
Weird.
A wave of dirty nausea nearly flattens me, my guts rolling again, the voices jeering in the dark back there somewhere. I keep my feet on the ground. I think of an old movie I used to like and an imaginary cartoon voice starts squeaking in a chiding nursery-rhyme drawl: feed me, Seymour, feeeeeed me…
On the main desk is my Walkman.
And the gun.
My mother’s gun.
The gun the old Indian left for me in the house.
The gun I was able to see and bring back because that’s always been part of my gift. My way with dead things. The way that almost makes me a god now.
Almost, but not quite.
I reach out for the gun, and it moves all on its own, without my fingers even touching the rusted metal. The Power giggles again, coming loose in a thin stream which I cut off quick, balling my fist.
I said fuck you.
It slinks back up my arm.
I grab the gun and stick it back in my belt.
Then, the Walkman.
The flat-screen TV blares the big event, less than a few miles away, at the other end of the giant theme park plaza—the same amphitheater Sidney Jaeger was broadcasting from when we left Los Angeles. The commentators are going on and on about terrorist activity rumors, some kind of official statement to be made during Senator Maxton’s speech. They keep cutting to a live newsfeed, with info bars rolling across the bottom: JAEGER LASER ARRIVAL SHROUDED IN UNKNOWN CONTROVERSY, HOMELAND SECURITY UNAVAILABLE FOR COMMENT…INSIDE MEN SUSPECTED IN RUMORED CORPORATE SABOTAGE…SEN. BOB MAXTON TO MAKE SPEECH WITHIN HOUR…
They buried it.
The whole thing, wrapped up in spin ribbons.
There’s all sorts of new versions of the truth coming across the screen. I try different channels and it’s the same there, too. Nobody knows what’s really happening. Nobody’s reporting the death of Agent Dryden or Rashid Hopi or the other cops who got wasted. No official statement has been made by any of the celebrities who were riding the train. Carolyn Lewis’s death hasn’t even been reported and she’s one of them. That’s why all the rumors are flying. Everyone is hanging on the edge of their seats, seeing bogeymen in every corner. It’s all racing in on me at once, just as a gun comes out of nowhere and clicks itself against the back of my head.
Lauren Chance aims a resigned smile at me from behind the gun and tells me to drop my weapons.
I tell her to take it easy, dropping my weapons.
The rusted piece of shit that belonged to my mother clunks at my feet.
Lauren stands there like a statue sentinel, covered by two blacksuits—Jaeger’s men, not the cops. Her grim little grin softens as one of them retrieves the pistols from the floor. She lowers her Colt Python slightly, but I don’t dare move.
“Are you okay, Buck?” she says.
“That depends.”
“You went a little crazy on those two guys back in the cell. I have to be sure you’re still one of the good guys.”
“Do I look possessed to you?”
“I wouldn’t know—you’re supposed to be the expert.”
I turn and look her in the eye.
She lowers the gun all the way.
“Come on, Buck.”
She motions to the door. The two blacksuits fall in step behind me. We move quickly outside.
There’s an unmarked car waiting for us.
I’m shoved in the backseat and Lauren slides in next to me. The blacksuits take the front. Doors slam. The engine guns. We take off on a road that snakes around the outer edge of the theme park. My guts do a crazy scramble in the sudden forward motion, but the Power stays in check.
I only notice that Roosevelt is sitting on the other side of me when I hear his voice rip off in my ear:
“My man, Bucko—back for the attack!”
The Dreamworld flashes by us. I look at Lauren, who slips the Python back under her black jacket. I tell her thanks for the save and she nods, still cool under fire. She tells me Jaeger’s people acted fast when the cops arrested her on the train platform. Some quick negotiations and she was out of lockup and on her way to spring me. I don’t wanna ask her what she means by “negotiations.” Sounds grim.
“Welcome back on the crazy train,” Roosevelt says.
She hands me her iPhone.
The video screen shows me a familiar face.
Should have known it would be him.
“Hello, Mr. Carlsbad,” says Sidney Jaeger, his tone measured and professional, not what I would have expected in this moment. “How are we feeling?”
“I feel like shit. Have no idea how you’re feeling.”
“I’m feeling a touch nervous, Mr. Carlsbad. I believe we have a situation on our hands, don’t we?”
“You could say that.”
“Care to fill me in?”
“You first. What the hell’s going on? Why isn’t there anything on the news yet? There were cameras all over that platform.”
“They only saw what Homeland Security allowed them to see. In fact, I just came from an interesting meeting with some very upset government representatives. It seems they confiscated some video shot on the train by Carolyn Lewis’s people.”
Roosevelt holds up a flash drive and smirks. “Not to mention this bad boy.”
I give him a quick shrug. “Your cameras?”
“Yeah, and I’ve got the data backed up in three remote locations too. You don’t fuck with the President, man.”
The Richard Dryden show—one night only, in living color.
“I bet it was fun viewing,” I say to Sidney.
“To say the least. They’re having a hard time explaining why their own men tortured unarmed civilians.”
“Yeah,” says Roosevelt. “And why when you shoot ’em, they don’t die.”
“To say that the powers that be are shocked and horrified would be a gross understatement, gentlemen.”
“It gets worse,” I say.
“What?”
“One of my own people tried to waste me. It was Tom. He said he was working for someone who wasn’t you—and I don’t think he was a spook, either. There’s another player in the game.”
“Tom Romilda was my employee. I paid him an obscene amount of money to guard your life on that train.”
“And I’m telling you someone got to him. We can’t trust anyone.”
“Mr. Carlsbad, you’re asking me to make some very extreme leaps of faith.”
“Then how about this: There’s a mark inside the senator and he steps on stage in just a few minutes. I’m going after the son of a bitch, and I think I have a few new tools to help bring the bastard down.”
“New tools?”
“It’s a long story.”
The Power pulses inside me, sensing everything dead in the air, in the car—even Lauren’s hair. Roosevelt looks at me funny, and I think he can almost sense it, too.
Jaeger knits his brow at me, considering all this.
“So you want to go in and get the mark out of the senator while he’s making his speech?”
“If the thing settles in him for too long, it might never come out. I can take him from the audience, but I have to get in close.”
“That’s a bold action. It could cost you everything.”
“I don’t care.”
He thinks about it for a moment.
Then, very calmly:
“A lone assassin is a doomed assassin, Mr. Carlsbad. History has proven that time and again. Allow me to assist you.”
“What did you have in mind?”
“This is my house, Mr. Carlsbad. Make a wish.”
Lauren Chance stays icy cool at my side as our car nears the amphitheater.